Molly is right — speaking shouldn’t be done for free

by on July 15, 2006

Molly Holtzschlag (famous XHTML and Web development expert) writes that she will not speak for food anymore. I’m quickly arriving to the same conclusion. Speaking is fun and all (and good for your career — one speech I did at a Silicon Valley user group back in the mid 1990s got me a $10,000 raise. So far that one speech has made me about $100,000).

But, if you ever get to the place where everyone wants you to speak you find out another truth: traveling too much is hazardous to your health. Not to mention your business. Kelly and Tantek and I had a conversation about this last night.

When I hired speakers I always tried to at least pay their expenses. You simply got better quality speakers when you paid (and speakers didn’t feel so much pressure to pimp their services or products on stage to get paid back). But to be a big company and not even pay that is just not right.

By the way, I’m sorry if I turned down your event. But I have to work on my business right now. Hope you understand.

  • Does there not come a point where people spend so long speaking that they become less involved in the very activities and industries which made them worthy speakers in the first place.

    Those that can, do. Those that can't speak about it. Not true in many cases (and no implication at all there Robert, I love your blog :-)), but many people fall foul of this and ride off the back of something they did YEARS ago which is no longer relevant.
  • Speaking is absolutely not fun for me. The horror of being in front of all these people looking at you while you try to convince them anything is why it took me ten years to get my master's degree. No one will ever ask, but if I'm going to torture myself by attempting such an excruciating activity, you can be darned sure I will have to have compensation.

    How the heck did I get though drama club in middle school?
  • Jake
    Look at those pictures.

    If you speak for food, keep it healthy!
  • Won't speak for food?

    Note to self -- if you invite Robert to dinner make sure he gets a little gift before he leaves.

    ;-)
  • Unless it's Gnomedex, right?

    These days I'll rarely speak unless the event is covering my travel and food and giving me at least 500$. Mainly because with food and cabs and travel costs, I tend to be out of pocket that amount anyways.

    I'm not the A List speaker Scoble is, but most events find this reasonable.

    Of course, I've chosen not to get paid for events where I really believed in the cause, and I've happily paid for events where I wasn't the speaker.

    End of the day, though, speaking takes away from my day to day business, so unless I'm going there for strategic reasons, it's actually costing me to go (far more than most conferences are willing to pay).

    That said, speaking is often a crazy amount of fun. It needs to be done in balance (some of the 3-4 week tours I've done just kill your body, and mental health), but these days it's part of being in the "Web 2.0" world.
  • I had recently listened to an ASP.NET podcast where at a codecamp the hosts didn't pay for a "before event" evening dinner for all the speakers to get to know each other...I thought that was kind of bad but not having basic expenses paid is crazy.
  • Range: most speakers don't have agents. I don't have one. I don't want to get one, either.
  • They should pay expenses and a nominal fee at least, depending if they are for profit, non profit or charity based, there should be different rates or perks.

    Don't you hot and in demand speakers have agents to take care of these things?
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